The Myths & Realities of Cousin Marriage in British History
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 26 ก.ค. 2023
- You’ve found a cousin marriage in your Family Tree? Don’t worry, that’s totally normal! Today we talk about all you need to know about the history of cousin marriage in Britain.
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A special thanks to the following institutions for their dedication to digitizing historical records and the Public Domain images used in this video, which are over 100 years old:
Yale Center for British Art
National Library of Wales
Digital Commonwealth
Boston Public Library
Smithsonian Institution
Wellcome Collection
Yale University Art Gallery
Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery
Other Images
Ancestry Images “For use as necessary for professional family history research.”
Llanfair Clydogau Church
www.geograph.org.uk/photo/359...
John Lord, 2013, cc-by-sa 2.0
Coedmorfach
www.geograph.org.uk/photo/207...
David Morgan, 2010, cc by-sa 2.0
A special thanks to Stephanie Richards for her pictures of the old Presbyterian Academy.
For more info on the history of cousin marriages, check out:
Cousin Marriages: Between Tradition, Genetic Risk, and Cultural Change, by Shaw & Raz, 2015/2020
Cousin Marriage, Then and Now, by Mary Jean Corbett (2013)
What an absolutely first class piece of work. So informative and beautifully presented. 😁
Thanks! I'm really glad that you enjoyed! :D
Good video. The most recent cousin marriage in my maternal tree are two members of my Graham family line who arrived in Canada in the early 1900’s. In my paternal family surname (father was adopted) there are Henle/Henley/Henly cousin marriages in Minnesota during the late 1800’s, German Jewish immigrants lines in Minnesota.
In my fathers biological line, the most interesting cousin marriages are the “blue” Fugates of Kentucky.
My wife has cousins here in Canada who married in the 1970’s. They went through genetic counselling based on the knowledge of the time period. They had two healthy sons, one has married and had healthy children.
The deeper I go into my family history the more cousin marriages I find.
Very interesting! That's great that your wife's cousins got genetic counseling. Increasing access to that kind of counseling is something that doctors/geneticists have been pushing for in Britain recently. My most recent cousin marriage was my great grandparents who were second cousins. I'm surprised it's the only one I've found in my direct line. I keep hoping for another one so I have a few less new ancestors to research! hehe
While doing family history research found this was common practice of cousins marrying. My daughter was going to call a son Dai.
Nice!
Just subbed, looking forward to catch up with your other videos!
I have yet to sort out the many Jones-Jones marriages on my maternal side, but most so far do work out as cousins by marriage relationships.
My Welsh/Salopian side one pair of of 4xG grand parents leads back to a pair of 8xG grandparents being my 7xG grandparents as well. There is also in the same line, back in the first half of the seventeenth century a member of the Salopian line married a member of the Welsh line. This ends up with a pair of 16xG grandparents being various other X x G grandparents through the family tree.
One of the family names is derived from the anglicised "ap Enion" the other took the name of their estate dropping "X apY ap Z" formula mid 15th century.
I hope you enjoy the rest of the videos! Glad you're finding answers to your Jones family. I'm always happy to find a cousin marriage cause it means either I get to do half as much research since I'll already know the spouse family or I get to do double the amount on that particular family hehe.
Some great information there, thank you for all the hard work you put into your contant ❤x
Glad you enjoyed! :D
Awesome video. I believe cousin marriage was also common outside of Britain/UK. Well, at least, I hope… otherwise my ancestors are definitely “weird.”
Thanks! :D Oh yeah, it's definitely something you find all over the world. Don't worry, your ancestors were totally normal, at least in that sense hehe.
Cheers Dai, that was an interesting and very well written video. Don't think I heard you mention "the E word" (!), or maybe I wasn't paying close enough attention when you were explaining the asylums and Victorian thinking, but it could be a good education point. Another aspect that could fit in here would be sister/brother marriage, you know, the kind where someone is widowed and proceeds to marry the sibling of their recently departed spouse. I see many examples also where a spouse dies and the widow (especially if female) remarries within a few months, underlining what you said about social contracts and the need to be a team to survive, especially if one already has young mouths to feed. Anyway, Diolch again. Already looking forward to the next one!
Glad you enjoyed! I'll most likely make an asylum-type video at some point. It's a tricky subject and will probably make me sad reading about it so it may take a while. And you're totally right about the marrying your deceased wife's sister. That was banned in Britain until 1907 and the "Deceased Wife's Sister's Marriage Act." I have an example from the 1930s/40s of that happening in my family tree. From the name of the act, it was normally the husband doing the remarrying, since there were often limitations in men's wills revoking the inheritance if their wife remarried. Interesting stuff. Thanks for your great comment! And the next video is already in the works!
E-word?
@@napoleonfeanor This was a while back, so my memory of it is a bit dodgy, but without watching the whole video again, I'm going to guess that I was referring to eugenics, but I'm not sure! (would that fit, as you've recently viewed it?)
@@owenphillips9166 I guess it would fit. I personally think we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water and have voluntary eugenics. I mean things like offering preimplantation diagnostics for people who have the genes for serious defects and want to have children.
@@napoleonfeanorOr (sorry) eunuch…? There was also forced sterilization.
Well done! My favorite cousin marriage are my G-grandparents. My grandfather in his 80s was diagnosed with an American-football-sized abdominal aortic aneurysm. The hospital hopped-to his pre-op blood work and diagnosed him with Bombay blood type!! (People who lack the protein that all AB & O blood types have). He had to self-donate for weeks before he could have surgery.
I worked in NICUs for a couple decades, one of which was in Sacramento. California has recall Large urban centers but really most of California is crop lands, forests, or mountains. There’re swaths of prairie above & below Sacramento. Isolated is a good description and we would get babies where one parent could be arrested. Some We could tell there’s a significant genetic anomaly but as Dai quoted not really a syndrome.
The real problem was the pesticides & fertilizers. There were towns where most were in agriculture and if a baby was being transported from those areas, you could almost guarantee that they were going to be strange genetics. I had my last child while working in the Nicu. I’ve been amazed ever since that Anyone is born with fairly normal genetics! I wonder when they started using the first fertilizers and what they were.
I like how you brought up pesticides and environmental factors. I find that when the cousin marriage topic comes up, despite being really common historically, people often give it a special kind of yuck-factor that isn't given to other factors that are far more significant in affecting our health.
Wow! This was both intriguing and fascinating! I will have to listen a few more times to let it all sink in. So much information given is a beautiful oratory. Thank you !
Glad you're enjoying! :D
I believe it wasn’t that uncommon outside of Britain, at least in the States… or my ancestors were “weird” 🤷♀️
Just found your channel recently and very addictive I have been doing my family tree for 18 months now and gone and quite far so my ancestors are all from Glamorgan in Wales would are always looking to find more information about them
Welcome! I agree that doing your family tree is addictive. When I started I like oh, this is very very fun. And then never stopped aha.
@@GenealCymru my last name is John funny think is everyone I have ever met with same last name I have linked to one my close ancestors within 3 generations lol
Interesting video, thanks. I am an amateur Genealogist. I have over 17,000 family members in my tree. I have found a few first cousin marriages but more 2nd and 3rd cousin marriages. Although religion did play a part I believe it was overwhelmingly to do with money and property. Women legally lost ownership of all her money or property the minute she married. It all passed into being his property. Her family would also had to pay her husband a dowry- a lump sum payment in compensation for taking the financial burden of support her and any children.
I am sure families of any property or wealth realised quickly that if their daughters married a cousin the money and any property would still remain within the extended family.
The cases I know about were mostly in remote rural areas in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.
If a daughter married a stranger they would see it all the property and money which had taken decades or generations to accrue leaving the families control.
It does not surprise me at all that the question “Are you related to your spouse?” never made it into the Census. The class of people who practiced intermarriage of cousin was predominantly the “landed” class. Those with property. Remember also that even when women were fighting for the vote in general elections (40% of women could already vote in regional and local elections), that 40% of men (working class men) did not have a vote either. A fact which is little known.
So the landed folk voted out the question because it would highlight just how they abused it for material familial gain.
Thanks for the comment. Yes, marriage was/is primarily an economic agreement so it makes sense. I can't remember if I mentioned it in the video, but there was a movement to add in that question about whether you're related to your spouse or not. It didn't get very far in parliament.
@@GenealCymru Yes, because it would highlight the way cousin marriage was being used to keep money and property within the family. I can see why though. At one time there were many gold digging “eligible” men who deliberately went around trying to entice young wealthy women to marry them only to asset strip them afterwards. It is commonly mentioned in English literature and one reason that male suitors would be grilled by the young ladies male relatives. They were also do “background checks” on the suitors. The world has always had bad opportunists within it sadly.
Cousin marriage also was more common than we want to think in remote extents of the Spanish Empire as the racial/social status was tied to the extant of one's Peninsular bloodline. Watch Dr Henry Louis Gates' interview with Linda Chávez for a humorous bit on this subject. There were too few Spanish families (women who accompanied their soldiers) who colonized places like New Mexico to assure a spot as Español on the census, so despite the priests efforts to prevent cousins from marrying, it surely did happen. I haven't yet found a documented cousin marriage in my Spanish lineage, but it might be lurking in there somewhere.
Exactly. While I focussed on socially isolated communities in terms of marginalized communities, this is a great example of how isolation is also enforced in the dominant classes as well. There was a book I read a long time ago that talked a lot about marriage in colonial New Mexico. It was called "When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away" from 1991 by Ramón Gutierrez. From what I remember it went into great detail discussing their cultural practices.
Yes, and it's a fantastic book about a sad period in history. I do see the terrible irony in that many of those who arrived to terrorize the Pueblo peoples were themselves victims of the Inquisition due to their status of being Conversos, aka New Christians, aka Jews forced to convert after 1492. So, even at the top of the social pecking order, there are those both pecked and pecker. And marrying one's cousin can be the outcome.